CES: Yahoo! CEO Mayer Talks Tumblr Ads, Ad Exchange

By Tiernan Ray

I'm at the LVH theater (what was at one time branded the Las Vegas Hilton) for the keynote of the afternoon at the Consumer Electronics Show, Yahoo! (YHOO) CEO Marissa Mayer.

At the start of the talk, Yahoo! Shares are up 94 cents, 2.4%, at $40.87.

Minutes before the show started, there was still a line around the block, so to speak, in the hotel lobby to get into the 1,000-seat theater. Not everyone may get to see this show, or they may miss the beginning, at the very least.

Consumer Electronics Association chief Gary Shapiro introduces her with a boisterous recap of her achievements, including coming to run Yahoo! in 2012 at age 37, after 13 years at Google.

Mayer starts by talking about CES as a place where “dreams become reality,” before mentioning the word “mobile.”

Mobile “takes the things Yahoo! has excelled at for years” such as email “and puts them into your pocket.” She cites a variety of stats, such as use on mobile devices having risen five-fold in recent years. Activities include checking stock quotes and email. “Does this sound familiar? This is who we are,” says Mayer.

The company, she announces, has acquired a company called Aviate. “What if your phone suggested music when you got into the car,” or fitness apps when you need them? Like Yahoo!, Aviate focuses “on your daily habits.”

She says Yahoo! has performed more than 600 experiments in the past year to understand user behavior.

She goes into some detail about how great Yahoo! Mail is, including adding capacities for “SSL,” an encrypted tunnel for data, last week.

Mayer trumpets several key content hires, including Katie Couric. And Couric is here! She comes on stage and they hug. It's her birthday, big applause for that from the crowd.

She recalls her stone-age start in the news business, when “harass was two words instead of one.” She started in the biz changing the ribbon on the teletype machine.

Couric says the flood of information has meant “too much information” but “not enough understanding.” She lauds Mayer's “commitment to the kind of quality content that will help us all have a better understanding of the complicated, noisy world that we live in.”

And she's off. Mayer says the team was trying to solve the problem of “fragmentation,” a problem, she says, of “too long and didn't read,” or “tl;dr.”

She brings on product manager Nick Deloisio. He introduces something new, “Yahoo! News Digest.” A product, one supposes, of the acquisition last year of startup software maker Sumly. The service will provide a morning and an evening summary of the news.

Time for a demo: he shows screen shots where there is a “nice picture” at the top, followed by “atoms” of information, such as, perhaps, a snipped of relevance from Wikipedia, or some related tweets. “As a user I can swipe cry quickly from story to story.” At the bottom of the feed is a count of how many things you've done, and the satisfying message “Done!” for a “feeling of completion.” it's available now in the App Store.

Mayer says the company wondered if it could combine the “elegance of magazines with all the information on the Web.” The result is a new way to consumer information, a series of digital magazines, starting with “Yahoo! Food.” It will have “snippets” and be led by “an all-star editorial team,” “taste makers,” and a “pleasing accordion interface.”

And leading the Yahoo! technology magazine will be … David Pogue, formerly The New York Times tech columnist.

He launches into a diatribe about the lameness of tech sites, with names dropped in such as “The Urge” in place of the actual site names. He says there is a need for discussion of tech in English. “You don't come home and say, Hey, honey, look at the form factor of this turkey I bought.”

There are too many sites out there, he says, obsessed with “tweaky” topics, and nothing for the 85% of readers who don't care about that stuff.

Pogue is showing the first demo of Yahoo! Tech — a stream of “tiles” filling the screen. As you click on a tile, it expands to show the article. And, there are no display ads. “Marissa is going to explain later how we make money with no banner ads.” There will be fresh daily features. One is reviewing Kickstarter projects. “I'm as far as I know one of the only people doing that,” he says. How are you supposed to know whether to fund these things if no one has reviewed them?” The site launches today. Right now! he cheers.

Mayer comes back up to talk about the new manner of consuming video. Mayer says the company wants to bring the elegance of magazines to videos.

Adam Cahan, head of emerging tech, comes up to talk about video. He notes that use of tablets and other devices mean people are watching video later in the day, more evening watching of online video. He announces Yahoo! Smart TV, which will intelligently select things for you to watch, in partnership with various parties, undisclosed, on a multitude of devices.

After showing a brief clip from Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update, Mayer invites out the host, who comes to the stage on a rolling desk that zooms out from behind the video monitor. Thence follows a slew of tech jokes, to fairly decent applause. The Reverend Al Sharpton joins the desk and jokes about a small chocolate milk company Yoohoo turning into a big company.

Mayer returns to talk about four key areas: search, communications, digital magazines, and video. They are “powered by two incredibly important engines,” Flickr and Tumblr. Mayer calls Tumblr “one of the most powerful publishing platforms” on the internet, and the brains behind the new digital magazines. She lauds founder David Karp, and invites him up. Karp, in hoodie, comes on stage to talk about how engagement zoomed by 55% last year, and 250% when talking about mobile specifically.

The average Tumblr post is re logged 14 times, he notes. “That's a huge part of the distribution power” of Tumblr. And for promoted posts, it is actually 10,000 times, on average, he notes.

Tumblr sponsored posts are now powered by Yahoo! Advertising, he says. That will add Yahoo!'s personalization ability to advertising. He hopes that will help advertisers make better Tumblr ads.

She brings out senior veep of advertising Scott Burke. He's going to talk about the problem of a “highly fragmented” advertising world. Ad firms today need to be like “systems integrators”, he says, doing too much work to tie things together. Yahoo! today is announcing a simplification of its ad buying mechanism.

The first measure is with respect to “native ads,” including the Tumblr ads.

The second measure is “Yahoo! Audience Ads.” It combines Yahoo! data with an advertiser's information.

Third, both native ads and display ads can be bought through a self-serve tool called “Yahoo! Ad Manager,” including a version called “Ad Manager Plus” for larger buys.

Fourth, he announces the “Yahoo! Ad Exchange,” stemming from the acquisition of Right Media.

Mayer says the new products “will make it simpler for advertisers to connect with their key audiences.”

To close things out, in true Vegas fashion, John Legend! He plays “Hear Comes the Sun.”

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There are 8 comments

JANUARY 7, 2014 9:36 P.M.

Ken wrote:

I'll bet she didn't address how awful the "new" Yahoo mail is and the fact that almost everyone hates it. Probably didn't mention that it hasn't been working for the past 24 hours or the virus-bearing ads that were attached to Yahoo in Europe last week.

JANUARY 7, 2014 9:55 P.M.

Ken wrote:

I was down $70k on my yahoo investment before Mayer took over. Now I'm up 125k. I love her. The pages continue to look better everyday. The yahoo sites are entertaining. I'm glad I'm 10 years older than Mayer. I'm counting on her to continue to bring great things to Yahoo! and to allow me an early retirement!

JANUARY 7, 2014 10:46 P.M.

Michael wrote:

Pogue should have showed a basically coded HTML page, no stylesheets, a logo on a white background, and a GIANT banner ad, then showed the real thing

JANUARY 8, 2014 6:23 A.M.

Frank wrote:

It sounds to me like the Yahoo presentation was whipped up lin the company high tech kitchen, like Yahoo Mail, to have all the delicious smell and sizzle of steak, without the meat. The creative, entertaining, moving little Yahoo logo is more important to the techies than the quality of the service they are providing their users. Yahoo mail hasn't worked consistently and properly since the "new" mail was introduced. And the fact that there is little chance to communicate with the provider, Yahoo, gives me the impression they just don't care. The "new" mail. IMO, sucks big time.

JANUARY 8, 2014 2:13 P.M.

Jennifer wrote:

She forgets to disclose how terrible the new Yahoo Mail is. It's laggy, unreliable and apparently seems to get hacked frequently. Most of its users are horribly disgusted by the roll out of Neo Groups and Neo Mail both of which have significant functionality issues and are not user friendly.

Most of us are leaving and going to Google or Hotmail. Bye bye YaTanic.

JANUARY 9, 2014 8:33 A.M.

pilgrim wrote:

she came out from under obamas desk?

JANUARY 9, 2014 10:37 A.M.

Anonymous wrote:

I would rather not have all the ads when I'm looking for some thing on the net. It's my P.C. that is being invaded. I pay for the service. Yahoo, take another look at what people want. I like my privacy.

JANUARY 24, 2014 8:14 P.M.

rachel wrote:

Yahoo still does nothing right. Their new email is terrible (I closed my accounts last month), everything they buy just sits and stagnates (have you seen the mess that used to be Associated Content and that Yahoo is now systematically killing?), and they are so far behind Google it IS funny. They'll be completely dead in a few years,and as for Mayer? She doesn't have a clue.

About Tech Trader Daily

Tech Trader Daily is a blog on technology investing written by Barron’s veteran Tiernan Ray. The blog provides news, analysis and original reporting on events important to investors in software, hardware, the Internet, telecommunications and related fields. Comments and tips can be sent to: techtraderdaily@barrons.com.